Washington Post Series on Teen Sex

Circulated by listserv to all health, education and government agencies involved in sex education, pregnancy and disease prevention, the Washington Post series is more than alarming. The premise is that the United States is creating its teen pregnancy and STD rates because it does not value sexual activity as acceptable, normative, pleasurable behavior for adolescents. If we just accepted this enlightened perspective as the Swedes have, there could be an uncontested campaign for contraception and condoms that would cause our rates of pregnancy and infection to plummet.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) helped frame this series using data from the mid-90s from the US and Western European countries. No mention was made of the fact that statistical data has been an unreliable, disorganized hodgepodge in Europe. Meetings within the European Union have been held for several years in an attempt to standardize the continent's health reporting systems. The impression given is that kids in European nations have great sex without any worries because fewer get pregnant or have diseases than in the United States. And that happens because of the liberal distribution of free condoms and cheap contraceptives.

However, in the mid-2000's, a different story started to emerge. In April, the Netherlands announced a 22% increase in HIV diagnoses and 15% jump in Chlamydia in one year. England acknowledged an STD epidemic of "astonishing" proportions in 2002. Since the mid-90s, London is reporting 75% increase in gonnorhea and a 141% increase in chlamydia among girls 16-19. Between 1999-2003, syphillis rose by 211% with 2/3 of the infections occurring in heterosexual men.

Once again, AGI chose what to report and eliminated a few important qualifiers to their data including that it is 1/3 of sexually active U.S. girls that become pregnant, not all teen girls. What does not appear in any of the series articles is mention of the societal transformation in these countries: marriage rates are plummeting along with the birth rates, nationalities are no longer replacing their elderly populations with children, reproducing immigrant groups are straining the national finances and services and obliterating national identities, financial security is iffy, religion is on the decline. There are other impacts of teen sex than pregnancy and disease rates that could have been included.

I hope adults will read the rash of new articles and studies with a very critical eye. The question needs to be asked of teachers, health professionals and government types "Is your motivation for working with my child a belief that sex is an acceptable part of adolescent development?" The answer will let you know the influence your child will be under because if there is no context for sex for an adolescent, there can be none for anyone else either.